This is how you take beautiful photos with a smartphone | Technique

For a decade, SLR sales have been melting faster than Arctic ice. We do not have to search long to determine the reason for this decline of smartphones, as it turns out to be the ideal alternative for those who do not want to carry kilograms of material to take beautiful pictures.

Just like with SLR cameras, an image is captured on your smartphone by light striking the sensor. Both the amount of light entering the sensor and the duration of exposure affect the result. There are three important factors in a camera that play a role: the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO value.

Aperture is a measure of the size of the shutter aperture in a lens. The lower the number, the larger the lens, the more background blur will be. Perfect for portraits, where you mainly want to emphasize the person in the front. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S10 can take photos with an f1.5 aperture.

When you choose Portrait or Landscape mode, your smartphone will automatically adjust the other two factors that play a role (shutter speed and ISO values). The lenses you can mount on an SLR camera also differ in focal length. For example, with the telephoto lens, you can easily take pictures of faraway subjects and the telephoto lens is suitable for photographing small things.

This does not go well with a smartphone. For a long time, images were simply cropped to “zoom”, resulting in lower quality. Nowadays, smartphones usually have multiple lenses to solve this problem. iPhone 12 Pro, for example, has three, Nokia 9 PureView is no less than five.

What remains is the factors you have the most influence on: the circumstances in which you shoot. Light, for example. Unless a conscious choice, it is recommended not to shoot facing the sun. When it is very dark, you can use additional light sources. For example, there are lights for barely 15 euros that you can connect to your smartphone.

Finally, stability also plays a role. You can partially counteract your wrist’s shaking by keeping your wrist steady with your other hand, but in some cases it will be necessary to use a tripod. The GorillaPod, in which your smartphone is installed, is not only flexible, but also extremely compact. You can put it in your backpack or handbag when you are taking pictures.